Vehicle cooling and thermal management systems are indispensable in modern ICE vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and electric vehicles. For example, a typical electric vehicle utilizes up to four radiators; one for the motor, one for the automatic transmission fluid, one for the battery pack, and one for the high power electronics. All of these components generate a great deal of heat, during both operation and battery charging. If a vehicle cooling and thermal management system fails, a runaway overheating event can occur, badly damaging or even destroying a vehicle and potentially harming its operator and/or passengers.
Multiple factors may contribute to the failure of a vehicle cooling and thermal management system, such as the breakdown of a coolant pump, a coolant leak, an improper coolant mixture, etc. Thus, temperature sensors are typically used to monitor the condition of such systems, with an operator being alerted to a dangerous spike in coolant temperature (e.g., due to a coolant flow and/or quality problem) that could jeopardize an engine, a motor, a transmission, batteries, high power electronics, etc. Disadvantageously, by the time coolant temperature has risen enough to trigger such an operator alert, permanent damage to such components may have already occurred.
Thus, what is still needed in the art is a vehicle coolant flow and coolant quality sensor assembly that does more than simply monitor coolant temperature.